Female War Criminals: Untold Story of the Balkan Conflicts

Belgrade Higher Court sentenced former Bosnian Serb soldier Ranka Tomic to five years in prison on Monday for participating in the torture and murder of an 18-year-old Bosnian Army nurse, Karmen Kamencic, in July 1992 during the Bosnian war.

The case was unusual because of the brutality of Tomic’s crimes and the fact that both victim and the perpetrator were women.

According to the indictment, members of Tomic’s unit captured Kamencic and took her to the town of Radic. Tomic then ordered Kamencic to take off all her clothes, crawl around and dig her own grave.

Tomic and other members of the unit also beat Kamencic with sticks, cut her hair off, used a knife to carve crosses into her head and lower back, then cut off the lower part of her ear.

She also pushed Kamencic’s head into cow dung while hitting her with a shovel and urging her to sing Serbian songs.

Finally, the teenage Kamencic was shot dead by another member of Tomic’s unit.

Most of the accounts of the 1990s wars in the Balkans only mention women as victims, mostly civilian ones. However, many women did join military units. The exact numbers are not known, but the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Bosniak-led wartime force, had 5,360 women in its ranks; some were engaged in logistics and some were fighters.

War crimes trials like the prosecution of Ranka Tomic have also shown that women can be the perpetrators of atrocities too.

First woman convicted by international tribunal

Former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic at the Manjaca army training camp in October 1998. Photo: EPA/DRAGO VEJNOVIC.

Biljana Plavsic, the former president of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska, was the only woman to be indicted and convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Plavsic was indicted for genocide, complicity to commit genocide, extermination, murders, intentional deprivation of life and other crimes committed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

She is also remembered for admitting that she was guilty of persecuting non-Serbs on political, ethnic and religious grounds. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

But although Plavsic pleaded guilty, once she served her sentence and returned to Belgrade, she made a series of public statements saying she was innocent and that the purpose of her confession was to get a more lenient sentence.

Professor Jelena Subotic from Georgia State University in Atlanta said that academic research has shown that female war criminals are usually perceived and treated differently both during and after their trials.

“The case of Biljana Plavsic, however, is interesting because it is difficult to determine to what extent her warm welcome back in Serbia and Republika Srpska is a result of her being a woman versus her being a Serb,” said Subotic.

Plavsic was convicted by an international tribunal, which is a very rare phenomenon. For example, the International Criminal Court has never indicted nor convicted a women in its history. There is only one woman on its wanted list – Simone Gbagbo, the Ivory Coast’s former first lady.

Gbagbo is wanted for alleged crimes against humanity during a post-election period of violence in the West African country in 2011. Her alleged crimes include murders, sexual violence and persecution.

‘Azra Two Knives’ and other perpetrators

Azra Basic after her extradition from the US to Sarajevo in 2016. Photo: Bosnian prosecution.

There are several examples of women being convicted by domestic courts in the former Yugoslav states, although not nearly as many as the number of men who have been found guilty of war crimes.

Maja Bjelos, associate researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, explained that “most women did not have command and political responsibility”.

“They were mostly serving as ‘boots on the ground’ and in special units, providing logistical support, et cetera,” said Bjelos.

One of the few women to have been tried for war crimes in Serbia was Nada Kalaba, who was sentenced to nine years in prison for crimes committed in Ovcara in Croatia by the Higher Court in Belgrade.

Kalaba was among 18 people accused of participating in the murders of over 200 Croatian prisoners at the Ovcara farm near Vukovar after the town fell to Belgrade’s forces in 1991.

There are more examples of women being convicted of war crimes in Croatia, however.

Sladjana Korda was sentenced in her absence by Vukovar County Court to eight years in prison for war crimes against civilians. She was a part of a group of Serb paramilitary forces and Yugoslav People’s Army troops who were charged with the murders, physical abuse and robberies of non-Serb civilians in Vukovar, Stajicevo and Sremska Mitrovica in November and December 1991.

Ivanka Savic, a civilian from Vukovar, was also sentenced by the Vukovar County Court to four-and-a-half years in prison for war crimes against civilians. According to the verdict, Savic was not a member of any armed unit, but in 1991 and 1992 she reported Croats to Serbian military units and the Yugoslav People’s Army.

Savic also actively participated in the intimidation, abuse and persecutions of Croats who she had previously reported to Serb forces. She was convicted in 2004, when she was 77 years old.

But probably the largest number of verdicts and ongoing court cases for war crimes in which women were involved can be found in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Azra Basic, a former member of the Croatian Defence Council, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for crimes against Serb civilians in Derventa in 1992. She was extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina from the United States, where she had fled right after the war ended.

During the war, Basic had nicknames such as ‘Azra Two Knives’ and ‘Bloody Azra’ bestowed for the cruelty of her crimes. Survivors from camps under her command testify that Basic made them lick blood from the military boots of a detainee who had been killed, eat Yugoslav banknotes, kiss the Croatian flag and crawl over glass on the floor.

According to one testimony, she also “engraved a cross and the letter ‘S’ on [prisoners’] backs and foreheads with knives, put salt on their wounds and forced them to lick it, punched them in their genitals and threatened to circumcise them”.

Some of the other trials of women accused of committed war crimes during the Bosnian conflict have also heard witnesses speak of unspeakable brutality.

Albina ‘Nina’ Terzic, a former member of the Croatian Defense Council, who was sentenced to three years in prison, physically abused Serb civilians at detention camps in Odzak and forced them to have sexual intercourse with each other. One of the witnesses claimed that Terzic forced him to have sex with a mentally ill female prisoner.

Monika Karan Ilic, who was jailed for four years for the torture and mistreatment of non-Serbs in 1992, was called the ‘monster with a child’s face’ by detention camp prisoners, as she was only 17 years old at the time.

In court, survivors testified to the cruelty of Ilic’s crimes, involving putting acid of open wounds, slaughtering prisoners with broken glass from beer bottles, and sexually abusing detainees.

Marina Grubisic Fejzic is another of the handful of women convicted of war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was sentenced to five years in prison for the abuse of Bosnian Serb prisoners in the Dretelj detention camp near Capljina in 1992, but still insists that she is innocent.

“How do I feel as a woman who is a war criminal, you ask? I don’t consider myself a war criminal,” she told BIRN at the prison where she is serving her sentence in Tuzla.

“I am someone who is proud of myself and I stood in places where men didn’t dare stand. I am proud of fighting for this country so that someone would not take my country away,” she added.

She admitted that she saw prisoners abused at the Dretelj camp, but claimed she never took part in beating them.

“I am sorry for those people. I am not saying they did not suffer, I even told the court this when I testified. I saw them beaten by day and by night, but I was not in charge of them, I did not hurt them and I was not in a position to let them go,” she insisted.

Going to war: a ‘man’s job’?

Soldiers mark the 25th anniversary of the formation of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, April 2017. Photo: EPA/FEHIM DEMIR.

Such cases clearly show that women are more than capable of becoming war crimes perpetrators, although the public is not used to seeing them in that role.

Bjelos explained that war is seen as a “man’s job”.

“Security policy is entrusted to male political leaders, five-star generals and security institutions dominated by men. The active role of women in armed conflicts is neglected and reduced to the role of the victim of gender-based violence,” she said.

Meanwhile the case of Biljana Plavsic shows that even women convicted of war crimes who held senior positions are treated differently from men in the same situation.

“There is a deep patriarchal assumption that, as a woman, she couldn’t have really been in charge, and therefore responsible, and she especially couldn’t have been in charge of putting in place policies that led to genocide,” said Subotic.

“Because of how women are still perceived in our societies, Biljana Plavsic’s legacy is that of a grandma and not of one of the architects of genocide, fuelled in large part by her own history of racism and bigotry,” she added.

Women are, of course, much more often the victims than the perpetrators, but from Plavsic onwards, court verdicts have continued to show that war crimes are not exclusively committed by men.